Tuesday, 14 March 2017

SF Premises

An sf story or novel needs a good premise. The author presents either an original premise or an original treatment of a familiar premise. Some premises are standardized almost as sub-genres like robots, time travel, alternative histories etc. See SF Themes.

Poul Anderson
A science of society is possible - but its application is distorted by social conflicts.

A cyclical theory of history applies to future civilizations.

A police force is necessary to prevent time travelers from changing history.

Corridors constructed in space can be rotated onto the temporal axis.

Time travel is a psychic power.

A few mutant immortals survive through history into an indefinite future.

A relativistic spaceship accelerates indefinitely.

Faster than light travel is discovered and spreads but there are so many intelligent races that it is possible to communicate and trade only within a local "civilization cluster" and some human interstellar explorers return to the Solar System to find that Earth has been sterilized in their absence.

Lifespans are extended indefinitely, instantaneous intergalactic travel is possible and an intergalactic planetary system is inhabited.

5 comments:

I did wonder if one of the ideas Anderson wanted to suggest in his Psychotechnic Institute stories is that NO science predicting how a society can or should develop is possible.

And I find John Hord's theory of how civilizations rise and fall more convincing that what anyone else has suggested. And, of course, Anderson adopted Hord's work for his Technic Civilization tales.

I'm not sure I can agree with your comment about "instantaneous intergalactic travel." We do see mention in WORLD WITHOUT STARS about how it took SOME time to travel by FTL to other planets.

And the idea of a mostly lifeless galaxy repels me. I hope that does not turn out to be the case!

I"m frankly skeptical it will ever be possible to preserve individual human consciousnesses in artificial cybernetic systems. This was one of those ideas I had difficulty "assimilating" in the HARVEST OF STARS books.

I don't think I've ever thought of Stirling's idea that in one single instant our technology simply STOPS. Disturbing!

We see what might happen from comets striking Earth in Niven/Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER and FOOTFALL. Stirling's THE PESHAWAR LANCERS contributed very interesting twists on that theme.

I do wonder how PLAUSIBLE it would be for the Western Hemisphere to not have been settled by other peoples as late as our 20th century (as we see in Stirling's CONQUISTADOR). If not Europeans, might not the Mongols and Chinese have done that? See Anderson's "The Only Game In Town."